Chris Amin

RIS Live is Live

Chris Amin

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Following a successful trial, we are officially launching RIS Live as a supported RIPE NCC service. Here's a quick look at the feedback we received from the trial, as well as an overview of what's new.


Back in February, we launched our trial version of RIS Live, a feed that offers BGP messages in real time. We received a lot of positive feedback on the prototype, which has made it clear that there is a real demand for such a service in the community. We have therefore made the decision to launch RIS Live as a supported RIPE NCC service.

Try RIS Live

Trial Overview

Through the course of the trial, a number of you engaged with RIS Live to put it through its paces. We were impressed by the level of engagement and the feedback that we received. Here's a quick overview of what we got:

  • 48 (positive) responses via the feedback form
  • 551,114 sessions
  • 6,010 unique IP addresses
  • 553,545,516,332 messages streamed
  • 1,378 unique client IDs, each of which required somebody to take the time to create a piece of code that uses RIS Live
  • Numerous discussions, bug reports and feature requests via email, meetings and conferences

Changes from the Trial Version

The production release of RIS Live is largely the same as the trial version. That means that your existing scripts should continue to work as before. In response to feedback from the community, several backwards-compatible improvements have been made:

  • The RIS Live Manual now contains a much more detailed protocol reference.
  • As a convenience, it is now possible to subscribe to an array of multiple prefixes. Behind the scenes, this creates a set of new subscriptions that can each be unsubscribed individually.
  • The AS Path filter pattern format has been expanded to allow inverse matches, meaning that you can easily see when a prefix is announced by something *other than* a well known correct autonomous system.
  • It is possible to specify a custom subscription to the simple HTTP /stream/ endpoint using a special X-RIS-Subscribe header. This makes it possible to start listening for updates involving a single set of prefixes using readily available Unix tools like curl.
  • Support has been added for an "acknowledge" socketOption that causes a "ris_subscribe_ok" message to be sent for each successful subscription.

Getting Started

Everything that you need to get started is on the RIS Live website, where you can find an overview of the service, a live demo, and various resources to help you integrate RIS Live into your software, including a full API reference. If you notice anything wrong with the service or the documentation, or have any other queries regarding the service, you can get in touch by emailing rislive@ripe.net.

RIS Live is just one of a variety of tools and visualisations we are working on. If you'd like to see more, be sure to visit our tools section in RIPE Labs

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About the author

Chris Amin Based in Amsterdam, Netherlands

I am a senior software developer working on RIPE Atlas, DNSMON and other RIPE NCC projects.

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